Massive Western Canadian police operation leads to major child porn bust

Four Albertans are among 21 people arrested in an online child pornography investigation involving police throughout Western Canada that helped free a Saskatchewan boy from years of abuse.

Operation Snapshot pooled investigators using what are known as proactive techniques: posing as children online or pretending to be pedophiles interested in trading child pornography files.

“We were going out and finding people who wouldn’t ordinarily be reported to us,” said Calgary police Det. Justin Brookes.

Brookes is currently assigned to Alberta Law Enforcement Teams, a provincial organization of 400 investigators that targets serious and organized crime.

The borderless nature of online child exploitation brought Alberta’s investigators together under the ALERT umbrella several years ago, but Brookes said Operation Snapshot was an opportunity to bring an even bigger network of police together in a task force.

“There wasn’t any one thing that spurred on the whole project. It was recognized to properly investigate these files, collaboration was the best method,” he said.

The combined effort resulted in 11 charges against four suspects in Alberta — three in Calgary and one in Edmonton.

The charges include accessing, possessing and distributing child pornography and luring.

As is common in large-scale online child pornography investigations, police aren’t releasing the suspects’ names until they have done a more thorough analysis of the computer equipment they’ve seized.

“We get to a point where we have all the information need to make the arrests and lay charges, but that’s not where it ends,” Brookes said.

“We still have months of work to analyze the data. That could lead to other investigations.”

At this point, investigators have not charged the Alberta suspects with abusing any children themselves — but Brookes stressed that could change depending on what further evidence police find while examining the images and files they seized.

In Saskatchewan, police said the investigation ended five years of abuse against a boy in Saskatoon.

Police said the child he was abused by a family member’s roommate, beginning when the boy was about eight or nine years old and ending when police executed a search warrant last June.A man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the boy, has already pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 30 months in jail.Of those arrested 16 have been charged in the operation, which involved police in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

Det. Sgt. Darren Parisien of the Saskatoon police, who led the operation, said hundreds of thousands of images were found on more than 100 computers or hard drives and 1,000 disks.”The vast majority involve children under the age of 12,” Parisien said at a news conference in Regina.”But more and more increasingly, we’re dealing with images of infants, toddler children who can’t even speak. That’s becoming a disturbing trend that we’re seeing in a lot of cases and certainly that was present in a number of the investigations involved with this project.”